How to Back-up Your course

You can back up your course just to 'be safe' or you can use backups to 'clone' your course

Automatic Backups

All courses are automatically backed up once a day. If you would like to access these backup files so that you can save a copy of it on your own hard drive, follow the instructions below.

How to access your automatic back-ups

Navigate to your course home page and click on ‘restore’ in the administration block on the left side.

Then a page will pop up with all of the backups that are available. Look for the section that says ‘Automated backups’ and you’ll see the most recent back-up file for the course you are currently in. It will be a long file name that ends in .mbz.

To download this file, click on the ‘download’ button to the right of the file name. That will download to the ‘Downloads’ folder on your computer’s hard drive. Don’t attempt to open that file but do put it somewhere that you’ll remember.

Manual Backups – use this method when cloning a course from one semester to another or from one section to another section

NOTE: because of our various integrations, it is NOT advisable to use the backup/restore method to clone a course. Using the import feature is MUCH better. However, you can use this to backup a course in case of a Moodle-outage (which has never happened) or if you want to keep your course content more than the 3 years that are available at any one time.

If you would like to run a manual backup, click on the ‘backup’ link in the administration block on the left side of your screen. (when you are on your course homepage).

The next page will show you a list of all of the items in your course. You will probably want to leave everything as is EXCEPT you should uncheck the ‘include enrolled users’ item. (when you uncheck this, a few other things will automatically also be unchecked. Leave those as is).

Click on the ‘next’ button at the bottom of the page.

On the next page, leave everything as it is and click on the ‘next’ button at the bottom of the page.

On the next page, leave everything as it is and click on the ‘perform backup’ button at the bottom of the page.

It might take a few minutes for the backup to run but then you will see a ‘continue’ button. Click that.

Lastly you will be taken to a page of all of the backup files from this course and also all backup files you have performed manually on any courses. Backup files are named with long names that include the course code and end in .mbz.

If you would like to download one of these files to save to your hard drive, click on the ‘download’ button next to the correct file.